The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

The Sedge-strewn Stream and Globalisation

The Vikings were horrid people to whom history has, for some strange reason, been very indulgent. Whether it was the rape, the killing or the human sacrifice that you objected to, it was probably a bad thing when the Vikings arrived at Lindisfarne in 793 and then began to work their way down the north-east coast of England. They quickly got to Yorkshire, and near what is now Harrogate one of them found a sedge-strewn stream and decided to name it Sedge-Stream. Except of course he didn’t call it that because Sedge-Stream would be English; he called it Sedge-Stream in Old Norse, and the Old Norse for Sedge-Stream is Starbeck.

Starbeck is now a little suburb on the eastern edge of Harrogate. The stream is still there, although there’s no discernible sedge and it runs quite a bit of its way underground in a pipe next to the railway tracks. The place-name is first recorded in 1817, but, as we’ve seen, it must go back to the Vikings, and we also know that there were people there in the fourteenth century.

These people had sex (as people almost invariably do) and produced a family. The family were named for the place where they lived, almost. One vowel was changed. The Starbuck family are first recorded living in just the right area in 1379. Since then two things have happened: the Quaker movement was founded and America was discovered.

The result of this double catastrophe was that among the first settlers of Nantucket Island near Cape Cod was a Quaker family whose name was Starbuck. Exactly how much they quaked is not recorded, but they did become big players in Nantucket’s biggest trade: whaling.

The Starbuck family took up their harpoons with a vengeance. They were soon the most famous whalers in Nantucket if not the world. In 1823 Valentine Starbuck was chartered by the King and Queen of Hawaii to take them on a trip to England, where the unfortunate royal pair died of measles. Obed Starbuck discovered Starbuck Island in the Pacific and named it in honour of his cousin.[18]

A little over twenty years later, a man called Herman Melville began to write a novel about whales and whaling. Specifically he wrote about a ship called the Pequod setting sail from Nantucket to hunt a white whale known as Moby-Dick. Melville had been a whaler himself and had heard of the famous Starbuck whalers of Nantucket, so he decided to call the first mate of the Pequod Starbuck in their honour.

Moby-Dick wasn’t a very popular novel at first. Most people, especially the British, couldn’t make head or tail of it, though this was largely because the British edition was missing the last chapter. However, in the twentieth century, novels that nobody can make head or tail of became very much the fashion and Moby-Dick was taken up by all and sundry, especially American schoolteachers who have been inflicting its purple prose on children ever since. There was one particular English teacher in Seattle who loved the book: his name was Jerry Baldwin.

Baldwin and two friends wanted to start a coffee shop. They needed a name and Jerry Baldwin knew exactly where to find the right one – in the pages of Moby-Dick. He told his business partners of his fantastic idea. They were going to call the coffee shop …

Wait for it …

Pequod!

His business partners pointed out (quite rightly) that if you’re planning to open a shop selling potable fluids, you probably don’t want the name to contain the syllable pee. That’s just bad marketing. So Baldwin was overruled and the others started looking for something a little more local. On a map of the area they found an old mining settlement in the Rocky Mountains called Camp Starbo. Baldwin’s two partners decided that Starbo was a great name. But Jerry Baldwin was not to be defeated. He suggested that they compromise with a little alteration to the second syllable that would make the name match the Pequod’s first mate: Starbucks. The three of them agreed, and that Viking’s name for a little stream in Yorkshire became one of the most famous brands in the world.

The high street might be a different place if Baldwin had remembered that Moby-Dick was based on a real white whale that was said to have fought off over a hundred whaling parties in the Pacific of the early nineteenth century: that whale was called Mocha Dick.

There are no branches of Starbucks on Starbuck Island, but that’s probably because there are no people there either, and the occasional seal is unlikely to have the cash for a cappuccino.